“… Here I Went Through Deportation – Which was also Torture for Me”: Air-Deportations and Liberal Violence in Great Britain

Abstract

This article contributes to understanding violence in deportation. Drawing on data from eight months of fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 and interviews with asylum seekers and practitioners, the article shows how liberal violence, in its various forms, is integral to the contemporary air deportation process. The violence, as argued here, is not unusual, spectacular or resulting from procedural failures and lapses in individual officer judgement, but is integral to it. The conclusion calls for scholars to consider the very practice of deportation as violence and a crime against humanity, gather comprehensive evidence with an explicit aim of making deportations interrogatable by international criminal law, and hold the British state accountable and demand reparations.